<p>Since the 1980s, software development has gone from a specialised and esoteric discipline concentrated primarily among American and European white-collar workers to a significant global driver of emerging national economies. Software managers and developers who ignore this global expansion do so at their own fiscal and productivity peril, since of software globalization affects the optimum build-versus-buy decision process at every level and phase of software development. This paper looks at one of the most interesting and controversial instances of software globalization, which is the expansion of the open-source software (OSS) operating system Linux into software development efforts in developing countries.</p>